About

Mission statement

The USU Libraries support the teaching, learning, and research activities of Utah State University, a land grant university, and serves the public through learning, discovery, and engagement. The Digital Initiatives Department creates, organizes, preserves, and maintains open access to digital resources that reflect USU's curriculum, research, unique resources, and achievements. Individually and in collaboration with other educational and cultural heritage institutions, this unit of the USU Libraries contributes to the pool of scholarly digital resources accessible to users worldwide.

What we do, in a nutshell

The USU Digital Initiatives Unit digitizes materials and manages born-digital content that is owned by Utah State University Libraries. The Unit coordinates the hosting of this content on the web as well as oversees the Institutional Repository. We select materials based upon their uniqueness, research merit, potential for curriculum support, and appeal. Copyright restrictions, condition of the materials, and extent of data available to describe the materials factor into material selection also. Typically collections spotlight historical photographs, journals, old newspapers, letters, and other interesting items from our Special Collections and Archives. By making these one-of-a-kind or rare digital materials available, the Digital Initiatives Unit opens them up to users everywhere, enhances access by subject and keyword searching, and reduces wear and tear on the originals.

Digital Library staff draw on expertise from all over the Library in creating digital history collections. Special Collections and Archives staff work with us in developing project ideas, co-writing and administering grants, selecting materials for digitization, and creating web pages. The Library's Systems Department helps with web page construction and provides technical support of our CONTENTdm software and our Linux server. Cataloging staff create metadata for our digital objects and every project includes a cataloger on the project team. As needed, graphical support for landing pages, webpages, and publicity materials is provided by the Library's graphics designer.

Mountain West Digital Library

Utah State University's Digital Library also functions as a regional hub for the Mountain West Digital Library (mwdl.org), a collaborative project digitizing and/or hosting digital collections from regional cultural heritage institutions (libraries, museums, historical societies, etc.). We are one of MWDL’s regional hosting institutions, each running a CONTENTdm server supporting its own digital collections and supporting partner institutions by providing scanning and hosting services. Interested in partnering with us? Contact Becky Thoms at becky.thoms@usu.edu.

Collection development policy

The USU Digital Library digitizes, presents, and archives materials according to the following content and selection criteria:

Content criteria: Material should fall under one or more of the following content categories to be considered for inclusion in the digital library.

USU Library or campus analog resources that are unique, rare, and/or of special regional interest and are deemed to warrant conversion to digital format

Materials that support USU teaching or research

Materials that support desirable collaborative projects such as the Mountain West Digital Library, GWLA Western Waters Project, etc.

Selection criteria: Once material is judged to meet content criteria, it is further evaluated to determine its need, suitability, and priority for digitization. Considerations include:

Is material already digitally available via other collections or services?

Is material free of any copyright or use restrictions; if not, can clearance from such be easily obtained?

Does material already have sufficient information for metadata creation?

Does material have a satisfactory record of provenance and/or authenticity?

Does material lend itself to digitization without damaging the original?

Would digitization of material meet a desired preservation outcome, such as:

reduce handling of fragile materials

protect from theft, misuse, or mutilation

be digitized as part of an overall conservation plan

Would digitization provide added value over the original format, such as:

An automated program transcribed our old Logan newspapers using optical character recognition (OCR). But, quite frankly, it did a lousy job because the print in these very old newspapers is difficult to read. People can actually perform better than the computer in this situation because they can use context and common sense to figure out illegible or missing words. If you would like to help us decipher the old text and send in corrected transcripts, contact becky.thoms@usu.edu. You’ll absorb some history along the way and we will list you as a transcriber in the record.

Contribute

Contribute to the Digital Library by financially sponsoring creation of an entire collection or sending in smaller amounts to help us digitize and host more materials. Contact becky.thoms@usu.edu or write to Becky Thoms, Utah State University, Digital Library, UMC 3000, Logan, UT 84321-3000.

Digital Darkroom With the help of a $25,000 grant from the George and Dolores Dore Eccles Foundation, we equipped and set up a digital darkroom for shooting large format and fragile materials not suited for flatbed scanning.

Equipment includes:

Hasselblad H3D digital camera

Super Repro Copy Stand 27.5 x 35.5 inches

Foam book cradles from UFP Technologies

Lowell e-studio4 fluorescent light (stand mount)

Osram Studioline 55w dalight lamps

Lowell barndoors for e-studio4

Matthews C+ Stand 40" DR TB Black

iMAC computer workstation

Digital Library File Storage & Hardware:

Main file storage is provided by campus central storage (SANS), backed by two off-site locations on disk and tape